Unfortunately that commercial was the best thing about Mazda’s rotary engines. My wife and I ad a 1980 RX7. It was great fun to drive, but the engine was completely worn out at 120,000 miles. Even before then it was going through one quart of oil every 1500 miles and getting about 15 mpg.

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You cannot have a rational discussion with someone who holds irrational beliefs.

Unfortunately that commercial was the best thing about Mazda’s rotary engines. My wife and I ad a 1980 RX7. It was great fun to drive, but the engine was completely worn out at 120,000 miles. Even before then it was going through one quart of oil every 1500 miles and getting about 15 mpg.

They sure were sexy, though. I wanted one bad, back in the day.

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Free in Kentucky—Humanist
“I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.”—Edith Sitwell

The RX7 styling was an unabashed ripoff of the Ferrari Daytona, which is a good thing IMO. The car was a blast to drive, partly because if that smooth rotary engine. But by 90,000 miles it was way down on power, which took a lot of the fun out of uphill twisty sections. Overall, though, we’re glad we owned it.

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You cannot have a rational discussion with someone who holds irrational beliefs.

Just because Mazda doesn’t want to make Wankel engines anymore doesn’t mean the entire design is now defunct. They didn’t have a monopoly on production of the design.

No, they only licensed it, along with a few others. But according to the article no one else came close to ever using it in a production vehicle, and from the sound of it, it is unlikely ever to happen. Of course, there could always be an engineering breakthrough.

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Free in Kentucky—Humanist
“I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.”—Edith Sitwell

The only reason Mazda continued with the wankel for so long was because the president of Mazda was a pupil of Wankel. GM nearly put one into production, but canceled the project at the last minute because they just couldn’t get the emissions and fuel economy anywhere near what they needed to be.

This put their partner in the project, AMC, into a bind, because that was supposed to power their new car, the Pacer. AMC couldn’t afford to do a total redesign, so they made the Pacer wider to accommodate their current engines.

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“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.” ― Philip K. Dick

Funny you should say that. The designer of the Pacer, Dick Teage, was on an airliner when he sketched out the design for the Pacer on an airsickness bag. If you look at the headlights on a Pacer and the passenger windows on a jet, you’ll see they’re almost identical in appearance.

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“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.” ― Philip K. Dick

Funny you should say that. The designer of the Pacer, Dick Teage, was on an airliner when he sketched out the design for the Pacer on an airsickness bag. If you look at the headlights on a Pacer and the passenger windows on a jet, you’ll see they’re almost identical in appearance.

Just because Mazda doesn’t want to make Wankel engines anymore doesn’t mean the entire design is now defunct. They didn’t have a monopoly on production of the design.

I’m confused again. I didn’t appreciate some of the technical problems with the engine:

But most companies found that manufacturing rotary engines that would run for more than a few hours an insurmountable task. The apex seals, the part at each tip of the triangular rotor, are an engineering nightmare. The seals are prone to wearing out and to developing vibrations that cause them to gouge the inside of the engine. They can even break off entirely, wrecking the engine. The oil seals on the rotors have also proved challenging to perfect.